Combat Power, Conflict Resolution, and US Economy

[AmericanPride]

I did. I see nothing providing real support to the assertion of unprecedented danger.

Dempsey did not claim any new emergent threat existed. He claims that the "unprecedented danger" is the simultaneous diffusion of threats horizontally and the proliferation of threat capabilities vertically. The testimony of DNI Clapper agrees with Dempsey's assertion.

I'm not sure anyone's speeches, and in particular speeches made by those representing institutions whose budget allocations depend on the perceptions of danger, are a good place to start assessing levels of threat.

This criticism would be more relevant and substantial if it also recommended a better metric.

The number of F-35s or F-22s or carriers we buy may be proportional to our economic means, but I'm not convinced that it has any great impact on our capacity to counter these threats.

As I've stated before, I will look at conflict resolution after looking at economic capacity and military expenditures. The information I have gathered so far indicates that US military power is shrinking as is US capacity to support said military power. Though GDP growth outpaces defense appropriations growth, US purchasing power relative combat power is reducing. In order to maintain the same level of combat power over time, the US must spend an increasing amount of dollars. Without reform, we will either reduce our military capacity or catch up and surpass GDP growth with military expenditures (so far, my assessment is that we are reducing military power in order to (1) profit private defense interests and (2) protect other government programs from defense appropriations). Regardless of what threats we face and the most effective means in defeating them, this is the real problem.

EDIT: Further, this problem exists before the costs incurred by the GWoT, which highlights the inefficiencies of the defense establishment. IMO, the GWoT should be a shot over the bow to the defense establishment and American public about the true costs of maintaining the status quo. In the US case, the armed forces have the double cost of maintaining, and then the operational costs of actually using it, which happen to exceed the costs of maintaining, even though we employed only a tiny fraction of combat power at any one time. This is the primary reason why we have abandoned the "two simultaneous major theater wars" idea; we can't afford the costs of maintaining our current force at levels necessary to fight them, and the current force levels cannot sustain two major regional wars. Activating the reserves is not a solution (even though that's historically the US strategy) because that only adds to the final cost. That's a major security dilemma which we avoided by simply abandoning the policy. I'm not confident that the Air-Sea Battle concept will provide any outlet for this problem if the failure of the "revolution of military affairs" (FCS, for example) is any indication.